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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22406857">carpentry and other demonstrations</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla'>patrokla</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canonically Unhealthy Relationships, Christmas, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Post-Canon, Repression, Unreliable Narrator</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-01-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 12:40:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>10,167</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22406857</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Has he ever given Boris a gift before? They were never people who gave each other presents, back in Vegas. It hadn’t worked like that, life in the desert with Boris. They didn’t exchange, they shared - everything. Food, drinks, drugs, blankets, beds, rooms, homework, even, on the rare occasion that the spirit moved either of them to do it. Theo suspects Boris would expand on his thoughts on The Atomization of the Individual if he brought the topic up. It’s not as though the way they’d lived had always been convenient, or even particularly smart - but it had felt natural, thoughtless and instinctive and good right up until the end. </p><p>It’s hard to reconcile those memories with the knowledge that Boris had taken the painting from him.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>188</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/itsrottenvibes/gifts">itsrottenvibes</a>.</li>



    </ul><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Five months ago I got home after seeing the Goldfinch for the first time, and thought about writing a fic where Theo gives his mom's earrings to Boris, possibly turning them into some other jewelry in the process. <a href="https://katherinebarlow.tumblr.com/">katherinebarlow</a>, whose research, goldfinch thoughts, and soup recipes make up all the best parts of this story, suggested cufflinks, and now here we are.</p><p>I'll be posting the second half of the fic, and some relevant links, in the next few days, but the cufflinks Theo picks out at Eddie's look like <a href="https://www.antiquejewellerycompany.com/shop/georgian-silver-paste-cufflinks/">this.</a></p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I work my jobs, I take my pills. Knot the tie and go to work, unknot the tie and go to sleep. I sleep. I dream. I wake. I sing. I get out the hammer and start knocking in the wooden pegs that affix the meaning to the landscape, the inner life to the body, the names to the things.<br/><br/>“The Long and Short of It,” Richard Siken</p><p>—</p><p>Theo’s on his way out the door from a Barbour family lunch, which eight months on from Amsterdam have become excruciating in only the mildest of ways, when Kitsey puts a hand on his arm and says, “Oh, Theo, I have something for you.”</p><p>The hand on his arm is light, a casual pleasantry, all the ways in which Kitsey is an amalgam of her mother and father, society manners with a warmth that Mrs. Barbour has come to show later in life. It shocks him sometimes, to see the real person fully emerged only now that he’s found distance from her.</p><p>Not, he’s realized after a dozen or so of these dinners, that it has anything to do with him - Tom Cable had been the elephant in the room for a few months, until Platt had made a joke that was barely a joke, having been the one to carry the resentment over Kitsey and Theo’s separation that Theo, rightfully, should’ve felt. Barely a joke, but it had been enough to crack the ice. It had melted quickly enough on its own after that, a little more every day, as Kitsey began to shine with a previously shadowed light.</p><p>All this to say that when her hand rests briefly on his arm, warm but only barely personal, and she looks at him with that uncomfortably sympathetic gaze, he’s expecting her to give the engagement ring back. (Hoping for it, maybe - tracking down Hobie’s changelings and keeping the bills on the shop paid is a steady drain on the reward money Boris had given him, and the ring had been embarrassingly expensive, a vestige of his childhood desperation to be accepted by the Barbours).</p><p>She doesn’t. She leaves him by the door and comes back with something held delicately in her hand.</p><p>“I didn’t have a box for them,” she says apologetically, as Theo stares at the earrings sitting in her palm.</p><p>He recognizes them immediately, of course, his mother’s earrings. He’d last seen them at the engagement party, had halfway forgotten about them after the madness of Amsterdam and the implosion of the careful constructs of his life that followed. </p><p>“Oh, that’s -“ he starts, and nearly says something monumentally foolish, something that he doesn’t mean at all, such as, “You don’t have to give them back,” but he changes course at the last second and finishes with “- fine.”</p><p>“They really are beautiful,” she says. There’s the slightest hint of regret in her tone, and that’s enough to remind him of why he’d left. That mild regret.</p><p>“They are,” he says, taking them from her hand and putting them in the inside pocket of his overcoat without letting his eyes linger too long on the glint of the emeralds.</p><p>She opens the door for him, and he has one foot in the hall when she calls his name and he turns back to her.</p><p>“Theo, I do hope you’ll be happy one day,” she tells him. “I do, truly."</p><p>He’s very tired, very, very tired of people recognizing his lack of happiness at a glance, but he honors the sentiment with a smile - cool, perhaps, but decidedly personal, and turns back to the elevator.</p><p>—</p><p>Xandra had kept the earrings in that Coke can in her dresser, the one with the cash and cocaine that had ruined Boris’ life, or set its course, anyway, but she’d never worn them. In his less generous moments, Theo attributed this to some rarely-exercised sense of shame coming out to play. Before Xandra, however, they’d sat in the dish on his mother’s bedside table, just one winking star in a riot of jewelry, a dragon’s hoard of gemstones and the occasional bead that weren’t on display so much as they were close at hand. Well-used, and well-loved.</p><p>He’d kept track of them after Vegas, not with the oppressively weighty awareness he had for the painting, but attuned to them nonetheless. It was the kind of regard he’d seen Hobie have for certain pieces in his workshop, a fond recognition for those things that make up one’s daily landscape. </p><p>At several points he’d considered giving them to Pippa, but something in him had balked at sending them back across the ocean with her, perhaps never to be seen again. That would have been a cruel sort of impulsivity. Giving them to Kitsey, in contrast, seemed logical. Kind. It was the sort of thing one did, passing on jewelry. He was trying very hard to do what people do, then.</p><p>After Kitsey returns them, he feels indecently relieved to have them back, and newly aware of them. He puts them on top of his dresser, next to the box he keeps his cufflinks in, and he considers them in the morning and evening, and turns them over in his head in the hours in-between. His room at Hobie’s is a mausoleum of sorts, the site of some of his weakest moments, a place no one goes but him (and Hobie, on occasion, to dust). He thinks about the diamonds and emeralds nestled against his mother’s dark hair, a sign of her most triumphant nights, and the one time he’d seen them on Kitsey. It was maybe the kindest thing she’d ever done for him, wearing those earrings.</p><p>While he flies to Palo Alto, and Glasgow, and Prague, checkbook in his pocket, righting wrongs, the earrings sit on his dresser.</p><p>—</p><p>He and Boris have kept in sporadic contact since Antwerp, although compared to the eight silent years that came before, it might as well have been the correspondence between E.M. Forster and Syed Masood. Boris texts him pictures of street cats and sunsets, and a beautiful picture of a night sky in a desert somewhere with the caption <em> gyuri take ths, tell him wht u thnk </em> and Theo thinks Gyuri probably doesn’t care what he thinks, but Boris does, so he responds, <em> It’s beautiful. He takes much better photos than you </em> and the silence that follows is a palpably outraged one.</p><p>Boris emails him on occasion, missives that can’t have been written sober for all the memories they shamelessly recall. And Theo writes him in turn, tells him about the way things with Hobie are unbalanced now that Hobie knows almost all of his secrets, about how sometimes tracking down the changelings feels less like penance and more like running away. He offers locations, sends his own pictures of airplane sunrises and foreign street signs like olive branches. <em>I’m here</em>, he says, and Boris, when he bothers to respond, never does so in kind. <em>2 early 2 b awake,</em> <em>Potter</em>, he’ll say instead, and Theo takes the hints.</p><p>This holding pattern finally breaks in late November when he receives an email from Boris with the subject heading <b>christmas??</b>. He almost doesn’t open it, feeling restless after a flight from Seattle back to New York, and unsettled by the emptiness of the apartment. Hobie and Popchik are out for lunch with Mrs. DeFrees, maybe -</p><p>—— or maybe gone. It’s an absurd thought; Hobie’s workshop is an intrinsic part of him, he would never leave it behind, but Theo indulges the panic and hates himself for the thread of relief that runs through it, the one that does not want to be known. Maybe Hobie has left, for reasons that Theo will never understand, and Theo will have dreams about Hobie and his mother, gone somewhere, faceless, unknowable, avoidant. He imagines his bedroom as the impersonal, identical spaces of the hotels he sleeps in, spaces he loves that can never love him back.</p><p>And then Popchik, who has been in the apartment all along, trots into the room as fast as his arthritic limbs can carry him and barks at Theo in greeting, and the web he’s been entangling himself in dissolves in an instant.</p><p>The email itself is a slip of a thing: <em> Potter, I know you do not have Christmas plans because you are a sad lonely man. Come to Antwerp and welcome the new year with a friend. </em></p><p>Or something to that effect. He sends back <em> fuck you </em> immediately, and then, after another minute in his room, his room where he’d tried to die, a room that would soon have Hobie and Pippa sleeping on either side of it and making conversation at the breakfast table, he writes, <em> fine. what days? </em></p><p>For possibly the first time in his life, in what must be an early Christmas miracle, Boris responds instantaneously. <em> Fly in 21st, I bought you ticket. Bring Popchik!!! </em> A pdf of his plane ticket is attached. </p><p>Sometimes, faced with Boris’ irrepressible confidence that the world (or Theo, at the very least) will bend to his whim, it seems best to simply accept it. He writes back <em> fuck you </em> again, just for good measure, then starts researching best practices for international dog travel.</p><p>—</p><p>Christmas, Christmas. He’s lived through it. He’s done it. Theo is a regular American boy in no ways that count, but he has done Christmas. The best ones, he can admit now, have been with Hobie, whose absent-minded personality coalesces into a checklist-oriented wassailer when the weather turns. That first Christmas, when he’d still been dazed from the lights and losses of Vegas, Hobie had put him to work stringing what seemed like hundreds of strands of lights through the apartment (a fire hazard, in hindsight) and decorating a five foot tall Fraser fir. There’d been eggnog and, bafflingly, a bûche de Noël, and gifts wrapped in tissue paper. A thick red sweater, he remembers, that had reminded him of Boris, and two tiny wooden elephants with interlocking trunks, carved out of the same piece of wood. Hobie had seemed embarrassed about the elephants, said maybe they were too juvenile, but Theo had loved them then. Still loved them now.</p><p>The question of gifts sends a comfortingly familiar bolt of worry through him as he prepares for Antwerp. What to give Boris? Boris, who had taken things from him, and given him many other things, with such frequency that Theo still couldn’t figure out which outweighed the other. The extravagant gifts he’d gotten for Pippa, that fucking necklace, the book - the delusional hopes those objects represented felt entirely out of place in relation to Boris. He gets Popchik his vaccines, and thinks on it, discarding half a dozen ideas as soon as they form. Clothes, alcohol, watches - impersonal things, or impossible to have made for Boris with any real accuracy. He doesn’t want to give a gift that’s a guess. He <em> knows </em> Boris, a fact that often comforts him when he and Hobie are sitting silently over coffee in the morning, and whatever Boris has done to him, he deserves a good gift.</p><p>The idea comes to him late one night in early December. He’s drunk when he arrives home, having sat through a dinner with Platt and Mrs. Barbour, and then attended Mrs. Barbour’s niece’s performance of Shostakovich’s piano sonatas at Weill Hall; a hamfisted recitation that would’ve made Boris boo loudly. He’s taking off his cufflinks when he sees them, right in front of him - the earrings.</p><p>Boris doesn’t wear earrings. But he wears cufflinks, Theo remembers seeing a pair lying carelessly on the lip of the bathroom sink in Antwerp, heavy things, platinum-plated gold with sapphires in the center. He wears cufflinks. He would wear cufflinks that Theo gave him, emeralds and diamonds. The thoughts stumble over each other in his head as he unbuttons his shirt and leaves it carelessly on the floor, collapsing into bed still wearing his dress pants, the earrings clutched in one hand. His mother’s emeralds loved and seen again. Boris would appreciate them, he thinks muzzily, right before he falls asleep. He would love them, like his mother had loved them. The way they deserved to be loved.</p><p>He dreams in fragments, strange visions that seem to have slipped through from some other universe. Boris at his engagement party, wearing his mother’s earrings, kissing Mrs. Barbour on the cheek and looking at Theo sidelong and sly. Kitsey in a wedding dress, laughing on Tom Cable’s arm. Pippa taking apart the necklace he’d bought her with a hammer and sweeping up the fragments, unheeding of the jewels winking in the crumpled metal. Hobie, brow wrinkled in confusion, opening a box with nothing in it and Theo telling him <em> the moon, I brought you the moon.</em></p><p>When he wakes, the points of the earring studs have left pinprick scabs in his palm. There’s a glass of water and an aspirin by his bed - Hobie’s doing, no doubt, an act of care that makes him feel more guilt and relief over his trip.</p><p>He picks at the idea all day, and spends an hour that night just holding the earrings in his hands. Memorizing the soft glow of the gold, the coruscating diamonds, the rich blue-green of the emeralds that hinted at something alien, something unknown and out of reach.</p><p>The next morning, he calls a jeweler.</p><p>—</p><p>“You’ve got a coupla ways of doing this,” the jeweler, Eddie, tells him. He’s a friend of Hobie’s, and so regards Theo with a mixture of warm familiarity and suspicion that’s almost made up for by his speed and reliability. “I know you said you wanted the emeralds set in cufflinks, but I drew up a few other options for ya.”</p><p>He spreads a sheaf of sketches over the counter, discarding some before Theo can get a good look at them.</p><p>“That one, oh, just gorgeous. It’s a chunky style, you have to have the wrists to pull it off, emeralds and diamonds, but I think you could do it.”</p><p>“Oh, no,” Theo says, “no, these are a gift.”</p><p>“I thought they might be,” Eddie says, unfazed, tossing the design aside. “So I was thinking - rings!”</p><p>Theo chokes on air, looking at the sketch. Two rings, gold bands with the emeralds in the center, diamonds set around the band. Matched rings. A pair.</p><p>“Good wedding rings,” Eddie tells him. “If you’re looking for that kinda thing.”</p><p>His mind immediately, nonsensically flashes to the dream-memory of Boris wearing the earrings at Theo’s engagement party.</p><p>“No,” Theo says, and it comes out loudly enough that Eddie raises his eyebrows. “Sorry. The cufflinks are fine, that’s all I’m looking for.”</p><p>“Alright,” Eddie says skeptically, but he lets Theo shuffle through the sketches, love knots and gold bezel and Art Deco buttons, considering and rejecting five or six before one catches his eye. </p><p>“Ah, those,” Eddie says, seeing him pause. “I’ve got the pair I based them off of in the back, let me grab ‘em.”</p><p>They’re antiques, mid-eighteenth century, Eddie tells him, silver with pierced quatrefoil central bars and slightly tarnished paste instead of gems. It’s the silver that draws his attention, the crimping around the paste resembling nothing so much as a bottle cap. There’s a suggestion of sharpness that reminds him of Boris, an impression of utilitarianism. </p><p>“I’d remove the paste, obviously, and put the emeralds and diamonds in - I’ll have to recut the emeralds...a rose cut, or maybe an old European cut, but the diamonds should fit with no problems.”</p><p>“Can you get them done by the 20th?” Theo asks. “I fly out the next day.”</p><p>He immediately feels like he’s said too much, the way Eddie’s expression shifts like he’s putting that bit of information away to tell Hobie later, but Eddie just smiles and says, “If you’ll pay for rush order service, sure."</p><p>Theo leaves with a receipt and a date 10 days out to pick up the finished cufflinks. He’s expecting to feel regret, walking away from his mother’s earrings for good, but instead, he exits the jewelry shop to find that the cloudy afternoon day has been recast with anticipation. </p><p>—</p><p>It’s a fourteen hour flight from JFK to Antwerp, but closer to eighteen with the ticket Boris had gotten him - four layovers, for Popchik, presumably, who spends most of the actual flight sleeping in the travel bag Theo had bought for him. The cufflinks are in his suitcase, settled in the tiny jewelry bag Eddie had handed them over in. </p><p>He feels something close to certain as he walks through JFK, or at least too caught up in the minutiae of the process to second-guess himself. But as the plane drifts over the Atlantic, the anticipation that’s buoyed him through the last two weeks of the Christmas rush, a flight to Louisiana to buy back a highboy changeling with Thompson mercury glass knobs, and a number of strained dinners with Hobie finally begins to sour. The cufflinks seem like too much and not enough all at once. What if Boris doesn’t like them? What if Boris takes them to mean more than they do? </p><p>The questions spin around in him and snowball through the flights, layovers, overpriced bottles of water, and coaxing Popchik out of his bag and then back in again, and by the time the plane lands in Antwerp he feels one interaction with an airport kiosk worker away from immediately turning around and spending Christmas making agonizing smalltalk with Pippa and Everett while Hobie watches him like he might spring another necklace on Pippa. But he’s already there, so close to Boris, and it’s that closeness as well as the absolute crush of the airport that forces him to abandon the idea, eddying him along the flow of lethargic passengers until suddenly he’s at baggage claim. He’s feeling that combination of scraped-thin weariness and jittery anxiety that so often accompanies international travel, languages he doesn’t know and people who don’t understand him everywhere. He’d assumed Boris would send a car, and is looking around to see if any of the people holding signs have his name - or, more likely, <em> Potter </em> - inked on them, when he sees him.</p><p>It’s been a year, but time is strange. It narrows and lengthens and loops back again, and the Boris that Theo sees is exactly as he expected and somehow something new. Boris is the skinny boy from Vegas grown into the man who’d called his name on the streets of New York, but more solid and self-knowing than he’d been last year. He’s settled in his body - grown up. For a moment, Theo feels desperately jealous. </p><p>Boris smiles when he sees him, mouth curving familiarly, standing still, and then Popchik, whose nose is pressed against the mesh window of the bag, starts to bark, and Boris laughs and comes over to them.</p><p>“You brought him!” he says, crouching down and lifting Popchik out of the bag before Theo can protest. “I didn’t think that you would.”</p><p>“You asked me to,” Theo says, and Boris looks up and smiles at him, veneers glinting in the airport lights. </p><p>“I did,” he agrees, “and now here he is.”</p><p>Despite the growing weight in the pit of Theo’s stomach, he can’t help but smile back.</p><p>—</p><p>Boris is still in the same apartment in Antwerp, a second floor loft with wide windows and red brick walls. Theo thinks, as he'd thought a year ago, that it would be quite hard to identify the pieces of Boris that have sunk into the place if you didn’t know him very well. The expensive-looking sound system, perhaps, and the extravagantly fluffy throw on the couch, and the cabinet in the kitchen stocked with enough canned food to last a war - bits of him. But the overall impression is one of not-quite casual wealth, youthful, sleek, and serious, like Boris' leather jacket. A professionally-composed facade. </p><p>Boris has been talking constantly since they left the airport and got in a cab, ideas for things to do, how the weather has been too warm for snow, fucking climate change, no? and how Popchik has gotten even fatter, what does Theo feed him, and what is Theo feeding himself, he looks like shit, and I say that as a friend, Potter, you look terrible, how will you ever find a wife and on and on as they ride through slushy streets until they're standing in his living room. Popchik immediately sets off to investigate every inch of the wood floors, and Theo watches him solely to avoid looking Boris in the eyes. </p><p>"I think I need to sleep for a couple of hours," he says, and Boris laughs, not unkindly.</p><p>"You will jetlag yourself to hell if you do that," he says. "No, it is only seven in the morning. Let me put your bag in the bedroom, and then I'll make you some coffee."</p><p>"You can't make coffee for shit," Theo says, although really he's running <em> the bedroom </em> over in his head - hadn't there been a guest room, last time? He'd been delirious with fever for half of it, but had he slept in Boris' bed? Wouldn't he remember that?</p><p>"And you would know this how? You haven't had my coffee in years!" Boris protests, "I invite you into my home and this is how you treat me. I’m wounded, Potter."</p><p>"Jesus," Theo says, although it turns into a yawn halfway through, "I'll make tea, okay?” and Boris waves a hand at him impatiently and goes down the hall with Theo’s bag.</p><p>In the kitchen, Theo puts the kettle on and immediately realizes he has no idea where Boris keeps his tea. He opens a few cabinets tentatively, half-expecting something terrible to fall out - guns, heroin, the painting - but there’s only mismatched (but neatly organized) crockery, several packages of Kedem biscuits, and a dusty tin of looseleaf black tea with a Cyrillic label. </p><p>He’s got two mugs ready on the counter by the time Boris re-emerges from the bedroom. Popchik is already asleep, splayed out on the floor in front of the couch, and Boris stops to run a hand over him.</p><p>“I’m beginning to think your invitation was mostly for Popchik,” Theo says, bringing the tea over. “You didn’t have to make him fly all the way over here, you know.”</p><p>“<em>Dzięki,</em>” Boris says absently, taking his mug. “But Popchik is the one here with no real business, so why should I fly to see him? He has all the time in the world.”</p><p>Before either of them can confront the obvious lie of that statement, Boris takes a sip of his tea and swears approvingly.</p><p>“Boiling hot with sugar, you remember!” he says, and Theo feels himself flush.</p><p>“Well, you made me make you tea all the time,” he says defensively, and Boris shakes his head.</p><p>“I’m saying, is a nice thing that you remember. Even nicer thing that the memory can be put to use, yes?”</p><p>“I guess,” Theo says, still feeling embarrassed, but he knows that Boris is right. It did send a tiny thrill through him to have that knowledge about Boris, and he suspects that Boris, who assumes what sometimes seems like a complete knowledge of him, feels the same way.</p><p>“Was thinking about this the other day,” Boris continues, settling on the couch and cupping his hands around the mug. “I’m thinking, I have known Potter for over a decade now, almost half of our lives.”</p><p>“And?” Theo says, sensing a set-up.</p><p>“<em>And</em>, he has had same terrible glasses the entire time! So I start to worry - I’m sitting in a cab, and I start to worry, is this because he thinks Harry Potter glasses make him look cool?”</p><p>“Oh, fuck you,” Theo says, rolling his eyes, “this from the guy who got fake teeth.”</p><p>“Not fake!” Boris protests, “veneers, the real teeth are behind the fake ones.”</p><p>“Oh, sorry, this from the guy who has fake teeth in front of his real teeth. Please, tell me more about my terrible glasses.”</p><p>“Gladly, I have a year’s worth of insults,” Boris says cheerfully, and Theo kicks his ankle and Boris flicks hot tea at him and Popchik wakes up and immediately starts to bark, and for a moment, everything that matters is exactly how it was a decade ago.</p><p>—</p><p>Only for a moment, though. The rest of the day consists of Boris forcing an increasingly begrudging Theo through a series of mundane, tourist-y activities - lunch at a tiny cafe, a museum, a walk down some cobbled street that Theo’s sure would be very charming under most other circumstances, when he’s not fighting off exhaustion, overstimulation, and anxiety. Boris eyes him around five and suggests that they get takeout for dinner, because you’ll crash ten seconds after that, Potter, I can see it in your face. It’s then, waiting by the counter of the Polish restaurant down the street from Boris’ apartment, that Theo’s mind begins to run over his words from earlier. <em> The </em> bedroom. </p><p>He remembers caring about this when they were younger, the bedsharing, the lifesharing, but drugs and hunger and desperation could justify a multitude of sins, and he’d often justified it then with those very reasons. </p><p>And Boris...Boris had seen it as something and pretended it was nothing. <em>The only man I’ve ever shared a bed with</em>, he’d said. Said Theo had made it more than it was, but then last time - in Antwerp -</p><p>“Potter, dinner!” Boris says, holding up the takeout bags and shaking Theo out of his thoughts. </p><p>—</p><p>There are containers of pea soup that Theo remembers from last time, and they eat it with Polish gnocchi and sausage on the couch, Boris half-watching <em> Billy Liar </em>and tossing pieces of sausage to an attentive Popchik while Theo tries not to fall asleep in his soup. He almost wishes he would - wishes he could avoid any conversations about sleeping arrangements by conveniently drifting off. Instead, Boris nudges him awake as Billy tries to stuff unsold calendars down a toilet, and murmurs, “Come on, let’s get you to bed, eh?”</p><p>The touch sparks him awake just long enough to stay a few careful steps behind Boris as he walks down the hall to a bedroom - Boris’ bedroom, obviously, he knows it at first glance. Black sheets, a skewed down comforter. Oak lowboy in the corner with a little black case on it that Theo would bet money contains clean needles, and a little silver plate with solid pieces of jewelry, heavy silver rings and necklaces that makes Theo flush. His bag is next to the bed, and Boris gestures at it needlessly, then at the room as a whole. </p><p>“Same as before, I think,” he says.</p><p>“I - yes. I don’t really remember,” Theo says. “I was sick.”</p><p>And drunk. And -</p><p>“Yes,” Boris says, and Theo realizes suddenly that Boris is unsure about this, too.</p><p>“I don’t want to take your bed,” he says, all in a rush, and Boris is shaking his head before Theo can finish the sentence.</p><p>“No, no, I’ll sleep on couch,” he mutters. “Terrible to make a guest sleep on couch for first night.”</p><p>He leaves a minute after that, staying just long enough to grab pajamas from the dresser, and Theo lets him go. He expects to fall asleep immediately, <em> wants </em>to fall asleep immediately, but Boris’ mattress is too soft, his comforter too warm, the room unfamiliarly dark, and it takes a long time for him to drag himself into sleep with shame on his tongue.</p><p>—</p><p>The next day Boris makes them tea, and takes Theo out to an ornate cathedral, decorated in stained glass and Rubens. He makes up nonsense stories about the people in the windows, but when they wander over to a bye-altar with votives and a statue of the Virgin Mary, he lights two candles with a solemn expression.</p><p>“For our mothers,” he tells Theo, so sincere it makes Theo’s chest ache. He runs a finger against the quickly heating glass of one candle, then another. He has never been able to pray. He regrets, and hopes it’s enough.</p><p>They drink too much wine with lunch, and then Boris drags him to Aldi, both of them tipsy at best, to do grocery shopping. He buys a truly egregious number of biscuits, two bags of frozen potato and onion vareniki that he tries to hide from Theo, and a surprising number of vegetables. </p><p>This last purchase results in an argument about their childhood eating habits that continues through the checkout line, in front of a bemused clerk, and the entire walk home.</p><p>“Was not going to shoplift fucking <em> carrots</em>, Potter, what would we have done with them?” Boris is saying as he unlocks the door to his apartment. </p><p>“There are lots of things you can do with carrots!” Theo insists. “Soups! You can eat them with hummus!”</p><p>“Hummus,” Boris scoffs, dropping the bags of groceries and ducking down to pick up Popchik. “Not once in my life have I seen you eat hummus.”</p><p>“We - we spent years apart -”</p><p>“Not once in my life! Not once! Never!”</p><p>And so on. By the time they’ve both run out of steam, Boris is frying the vareniki with leeks and butter in an absurdly small pan, they’re on their third bottle of wine, and Theo has furiously roped himself into a promise to make dinner with <em> fucking carrots </em> the next night. </p><p>If it’s strange that they stick to wine all night, Boris doesn’t mention it, not through dinner and the third bottle, and not sitting out in the freezing cold on a tiny, dusty balcony with a fourth. They’ve abandoned glasses by this point, passing the bottle back and forth like Vegas but colder, less bloody. </p><p>Boris is in the middle of trying to convince him that skiing is the Eastern European businessman’s golf when Theo tips over from ‘drunk enough to forget about his concerns’ to ‘too drunk not to think about them,’ and the wave of anxiety and nausea that washes over him has him suddenly spoiling for a fight. He’s painfully aware of the cufflinks, just down the hall, when he interrupts Boris and says, “Your wife skis, doesn’t she?”</p><p>“What -” Boris starts, looking only a little less drunk than Theo feels, and clearly caught off guard by the question. “My wife?”</p><p>“Yes,” Theo says, and then continues, perhaps unwisely, “doesn’t she ski?”</p><p>He drags her name out of his memory, far too clear. “Astrid.”</p><p>“Astrid,” Boris sighs, “yes, my wife.”</p><p>Theo laughs abruptly, loud enough that Boris raises his eyebrows, and says, “Are we going to keep pretending she’s real?”</p><p>He doesn’t mean to ask. Or, he does, but he hadn’t meant to before that moment. He feels, suddenly, like he’s halfway across a bridge that’s beginning to sway ominously. No good options on either side, just a long drop.</p><p>“Potter, I -” Boris starts, stumbling over his words, wine bottle hanging in his hand. “She is real. You think I make up fake wife, fake children to impress you?”</p><p>He says it with such disbelief that Theo starts to blush furiously, embarrassed that yes, he had thought that, or something similar. </p><p>“No,” he says, and Boris snorts. “I just - they don’t look like you. The kids.”</p><p>Boris seems to contemplate that for a moment, then stands up, metal chair legs scraping on the porch floor, wobbling a little as he looks down at Theo, pupils blown wide, all-consuming. The wine bottle is still in his hand.</p><p>“They don’t look like me,” he repeats, words slow and considered. Theo looks up at him and feels like he’s falling. Just a little too fast to have regrets - yet. </p><p>“They look like her,” Boris is saying. “They’re her - she’s - Potter, you have to ask this now? When we are both <em> v gavno</em>, drunk to our elbows, you ask me this?”</p><p>From where Theo is, it seems like a reasonable question. Still mid-air, he can see the potential for the evening speeding away in different directions. It would be so easy to stand up, look down at Boris, and make demands. He can almost feel himself doing it even as he stays seated, like a sense memory, looming over Boris. And even easier would be to say <em> yes, yes, I’m asking you. Tell me the truth, for once. The lies have never been good for me. </em></p><p>Instead, he shakes his head, avoiding Boris’ eyes, and laughs again. </p><p>“Forget it. It doesn’t matter,” he says, and only then does he stand. He sways a little, but finds his balance easier than he’d thought he would. </p><p>“I’m gonna -” he gestures inside, and Boris says, “Yes, good idea,” tone impenetrable, and they go back in. </p><p>Theo heads down the hall to Boris’ bedroom, unthinking, and he startles a bit when Boris follows him. He opens his mouth to apologize, maybe, certainly offer to sleep on the couch, but Boris grabs the case on the lowboy, gives him a thin smile, and goes back to the living room.</p><p>He dreams in sharp, billowing bursts that night, coming awake with a gasp and some half-formed, forgotten word on his tongue, then falling back into sleep and smoke and rubble.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Here it is! As promised last chapter, some links to relevant things:</p><p>First, the cufflinks that Theo picks out at Eddie's look like <a href="https://www.antiquejewellerycompany.com/shop/georgian-silver-paste-cufflinks/">this</a>, and you can see another likely made by the same jeweler in the Portable Antiquities Scheme database <a href="https://finds.org.uk/database/artefacts/record/id/944492">here</a>. Audrey's earrings look something like <a href="https://www.fascinatingdiamonds.com/jewelry/drop-with-green-emerald-in-18k-yellow-gold/gemstone-pear-drop-stud-earring/4915p6m668s0c">this</a>. What it all looks like combined is something best left to the imagination. You can find some other thoughts and pictures about this fic on <a href="https://leguin.tumblr.com/tagged/carpentry-and-other-demonstrations">tumblr</a>, and finally, here's a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXr_IYUW0Uw">timelapse video</a> of a sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean.</p><p>Thanks to everyone who's read and commented on my goldfinch fics over the last few months, and thanks especially to katherinebarlow - this wouldn't have been any fun without you!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the morning, they don’t talk about it. Boris disappears for a few hours to “take care of work, tiny thing, no problems,” and Theo takes Popchik on an uncomfortably slow walk around Boris’ neighborhood. The biting cold finally forces them back indoors, where Popchik collapses into an exhausted heap, and then Theo has nothing to occupy him besides inventorying the contents of Boris’ kitchen cabinets and thinking about his regrets. </p><p>Boris arrives while Theo is halfway through the first activity, and an indeterminable point into the second. </p><p>“Cleaning me out, Potter?” he asks lightly, brushing a dusting of snow off of his shoulders. </p><p>Theo, surrounded by cans, sitting on a kitchen floor that is undeniably not his own, feels suddenly awkward. </p><p>It’s an old habit to take stock of things at Hobie’s, a cornerstone of shop management, and it had seemed so reasonable to do it an hour ago. Now, though, it feels like an inappropriate collision of worlds. He would never have done that in Vegas - not that they’d ever had enough food to undertake such a thing. </p><p>“Sorry,” he begins, starting to push himself to his feet, “I don’t know what I was thinking.”</p><p>“Is fine,” Boris says, waving a dismissive hand. “Good to know what I have. Here, I’ll help put it back.”</p><p>He shrugs out of his coat and squats down by the cabinet, putting the cans back on the shelf as Theo hands them to him. </p><p>“Some of these are expired,” Theo tells him, raising his eyebrows as he holds up a dusty can of corn chowder with <strong>070912</strong> printed on it.</p><p>Boris laughs at that, and takes the can from him to put on the shelf. “Just suggestions, Potter. It’s fine.”</p><p>Theo hums dubiously at that, but only protests once more, with a can of tinned pears that had clearly been punctured at some point and had a sticky syrup oozing out of the top. That one Boris reluctantly throws away. </p><p>It’s afternoon by the time they finish, sky cloudy and premature winter-dark. Boris puts on some Belgian game show that neither of them pay attention to, Boris because he’s lavishing Popchik with attention, and Theo because he’s ostensibly figuring out what to make for dinner. The atmosphere is not particularly tense, but their argument the night before, though it barely qualified as one, casts the room in grey, uneasy tones. </p><p>Boris breaks the increasingly surreal mood as he often did in Vegas, with calculated chaos, throwing himself onto the couch next to Theo with a sigh. </p><p>“Dinner soon, I think,” he says, putting an arm along the top of the couch. It doesn’t touch Theo, but he can still feel the heat radiating from Boris, a faint but distinct sensation that burrows under his skin. “Then we go out. Think you need to see some more of the city, yes?”</p><p>Theo doesn’t feel that that’s at all the case, but the prospect of spending another night drinking himself into carelessness with nothing to distract him from Boris, or vice versa, is an unappealing one. So he nods, and pulls himself away from the couch to make dinner.</p><p>Boris joins him in the kitchen, leaning against the wall and watching him saute vegetables, offering a running commentary on Theo’s knife skills until Theo throws the rest of the leeks at him and tells him to put his money where his mouth is. Irritatingly, Boris makes quick, precise work of the rest of the vegetables, even worse, he offers commentary on this, too.</p><p>“Tap chop, very efficient for carrots,” he tells Theo, and Theo grimly puts a bunch of parsley down on the cutting board.</p><p>“More mincing, less talking,” he says, and Boris laughs at him.</p><p>“I didn’t even think you could cook,” Theo admits a few minutes later, once everything has been too-competently chopped and sauteed, and is simmering away. </p><p>“Ah, don’t really know how,” Boris says. “Just some tricks. Worked in a kitchen for a little bit, long time ago.”</p><p>“Honest work?” Theo’s genuinely surprised.</p><p>“Never,” Boris grins. “Was big fancy restaurant in Vegas, yes? Good place to deal. Order special off-menu and you get baggy under the plate, you know.”</p><p>“Oh, fuck off, there’s no way that’s true,” Theo says, and Boris just shrugs in a way that confirms his suspicions.</p><p>“What about you? Did not know how to make soups with three kinds of beans when we were younger.”</p><p>“Hobie taught me,” Theo says, after a moment. “And I tried to learn some on my own. I never wanted to - it was really good of him to take me in. He didn’t have to.”</p><p>Boris nods at this, understanding. “Want to pay him back, as much as you can,” he observes. </p><p>“Yeah.” Theo looks away from him and down at the soup. Stirs it needlessly. “I owe him a lot.”</p><p>He thinks maybe Boris will run with that thread, will try to mention Theo’s dad, but he doesn’t. Instead, an easy quiet settles in the kitchen as the soup cooks. </p><p>—</p><p>After dinner, they go out. Theo’s expecting something crazier than what actually happens, which is relatively tame. Familiar. There’s a bar, and lines on Boris’ hand in the poorly-lit bathroom, and then a club, and a few shots, and a dark-haired girl who comes up to them and kisses Theo for a long, long minute, tasting like cigarettes and vodka. She tries to kiss Boris afterwards, but he turns away and orders another shot. Theo thinks he tries to shout something over the music about her not being his type, but it’s hard to hear, and harder to focus, and Theo lets the noise and the feeling of his heartbeat rushing through his ears carry him through the night. </p><p>They stumble home late and loud, making enough noise coming through the door to excite Popchik and annoy the neighbors. Boris has an arm around his shoulders - practically around his neck, a hot, heavy weight, and he’s singing in Russian in Theo’s ear. It feels like the easiest, most natural thing in the world to pick up Popchik and collapse into a warm, messy pile on Boris’ bed. Theo falls asleep in between taking his shoes off and crawling under the covers, and sleeps without dreaming.</p><p>—</p><p>He wakes up feeling fuzzy-headed and overheated, trapped under the comforter and, he realizes almost immediately, under Boris. There’s a leg between his own, and an arm slung over his torso, and the way unwelcome sunlight cuts across his face makes him feel like he’s drowning. It feels too close to Vegas, too close in general, Boris’ hand resting on the bare skin of his ribs under the dress shirt he’d forgotten to take off. </p><p>He half-falls off the bed in his haste to get away, but it’s easy, in the end, to slide out from under Boris. He stirs a little as Theo moves, mumbling something incomprehensible, but he doesn’t turn to look at Theo as he leaves. Thank God for small mercies, Theo thinks, as he plods into the bathroom. </p><p>He emerges, after a cold shower and a brief interlude to sit on the floor of the shower with his head bent under the spray, feeling much more normal. In an effort to impose that sense of normalcy on the world around him, he goes to the kitchen instead of back to bed. It helps to stand there, bare feet on the cool wooden floor, nothing and no one touching him. </p><p>Boris comes down the hall as he’s poring over the Cyrillic on the box of black tea.</p><p>“Is nothing very interesting on there,” Boris mumbles, sparing him a heavy-lidded glance as he turns the burner on under the kettle. </p><p>“I know,” Theo says absently, “I can read it - the letters, anyway. What’s loshka mean?”</p><p>“Lozhka,” Boris says, turning to look at him alertly, the sleep wearing away right in front of Theo’s eyes. “Means like..one full teaspoon - teaspoonful. Didn’t know your class taught you anything, Potter.”</p><p>“A little,” Theo shrugs. “I think those are the only classes I remember anything from.”</p><p>Boris laughs at that. “Important classes?”</p><p>“Depends on how you count it,” Theo says wryly. “Not for my degree, anyway.”</p><p>Neither of them are up for going out to eat after such a late night, but Boris persuades Theo into taking Popchik on a short walk while he makes breakfast. The streets are slushy and almost quiet, and Theo’s abruptly reminded that today is Christmas Eve, and tomorrow he’ll have to give Boris his gift. His mind refuses to even picture the cufflinks, sitting in their white organza bag. Should he have put them in a box? No, the very idea of handing Boris a black velvet jewelry box makes him shudder. </p><p>Part of the problem of it all is that the situation - the gifting, clear and unambiguous, is unprecedented. Has he ever given Boris a gift before? They were never people who gave each other <em> presents </em> , back in Vegas. It hadn’t worked like that, life in the desert with Boris. They didn’t exchange, they shared - everything. Food, drinks, drugs, blankets, beds, rooms, homework, even, on the rare occasion that the spirit moved either of them to do it. Theo suspects Boris would expand on his thoughts on The Atomization of the Individual if he brought the topic up. It’s not as though the way they’d lived had always been convenient, or even particularly smart - but it had felt natural, thoughtless and instinctive and <em> good </em>right up until the end. </p><p>It’s hard to reconcile those memories with the knowledge that Boris had taken the painting from him. He remembers making pasta in the kitchen on a warm spring night, Boris sitting on the countertop, legs swinging against the drawers, the two of them trying for no particular reason to piece together the lines of a poem Theo remembered hearing in his seventh-grade English class. There weren’t any clean plates, so Theo had dumped the pasta into a giant mixing bowl and they’d eaten it on the couch like that, jabbing their forks into the mass of penne noodles and canned tomato sauce and watching infomercials with the volume down low until they’d drifted off in a daze of carbs. Boris had broken up the hypnotic drone of the air conditioning with occasional mumbled commentary on whatever products the infomercials were selling: spatula set looks like bad sex toy, before and after picture of woman with platform heels is clearly different women, Americans are so fucking stupid buying this shit, Potter, can you believe it? </p><p>And while all that had been happening, the painting had been sitting in the closet of Boris’ bedroom, almost a mile away if you cut right through the desert. Three miles by the roads of the moonscaped housing divisions. <em> Not </em> safely upstairs, taped behind Theo’s bedframe, wrapped up in layers of battered newspaper. </p><p>But then, it’s a deceptive diversion, returning to the unknown scene of the crime in his mind as though that’s the reason for his hesitation. How could it possibly be, when Boris had taken to sharing everything in his life the second he and Theo had crossed paths again? <em> Stay in my apartment, sleep in my bed, let me buy you a coat </em>, and every vulnerability that came with letting someone into the mechanisms of his daily life. All of it given with absolute ease, as though being around Theo is not difficult. As though there is nothing complicated between them.</p><p>He’s still thinking about it all when he gets back up to the apartment and is confronted with Boris putting chocolate sprinkles on slices of buttered toast. </p><p>“Hagelslag, Potter,” he says, grinning up at Theo. “Very common for breakfast here! Eat, you will like it!”</p><p>Feeling entirely dubious about that claim, Theo bites into the toast. It’s sweet, a little crunchy, and more chocolatey than he expected - and not at all the kind of thing he eats anymore. He puts the toast back down on the counter, and says, “I think I’ll just have some more tea.”</p><p>“You don’t like?” Boris asks, mouth full and eyes wide. “Maybe the fruit hagelslag…”</p><p>“I don’t really like sprinkles,” Theo says hurriedly, before Boris can hunt down whatever fruit flavors might exist. </p><p>“Well, I will eat yours,” Boris says, and pushes the remnant of a slice into his mouth. “Then we can go to the market.”</p><p>Boris extolls the virtues of the Antwerp Christmas market as Theo eats buttered toast and washes the dishes only somewhat self-consciously.</p><p>“Have you been to it?” he asks, cutting Boris off in the middle of a tangent about Christmas lights, and Boris pauses.</p><p>“Ah, not so far,” he says sheepishly. “But this only makes it better! Something new for both of us.”</p><p>“You’ve never gone with Gyuri or Myriam?” </p><p>“They don’t live here, Potter,” Boris laughs, “and they’re Russian besides. Don’t tell me you take all those classes and forget about Russian Christmas?”</p><p>“I didn’t take that many classes,” Theo says defensively.</p><p>“So you did forget,” Boris says, a little smug. “Russian Christmas is in January, yes? Different calendar or something, Gyuri will explain if you ask him.”</p><p>“I didn’t forget,” Theo says, although he thinks he had, and Boris laughs again like he can see right through him. </p><p>For a moment, despite the fact that they’re the only two people in the apartment, Theo feels a rush of envy at the thought of Boris and Gyuri and Myriam sharing and knowing things together with an ease borne of both deep trust and shared cultural touchstones, all while Theo himself had been making mistake after mistake in New York, alone. But it fades quickly as Boris elbows him and says Christmas is nothing to New Years, anyway, and he remembers that he’s the one here in Antwerp with Boris. Making mistakes, always, but no longer alone.</p><p>—</p><p>Theo considers trying to beg off of going out, still tired and off-balance from the night before and his own endless thoughts. But the truth is that it helps nothing to stay in, to have Boris watch him do anything with undisguised happiness, in a way that no one has ever watched him. So they do go to the market, although too early in the day for the lights to create much of an effect. It’s loud, crowded, full of accents Theo recognizes, and he keeps wondering at how Boris can enjoy being such a tourist in his own city. The whole event is the kind of thing Theo tries to push through every day in New York, but Boris stops at almost every stall and watches the Ferris wheel with considering eyes until Theo pulls him into a sculptured forest.</p><p>There’s an outdoor ice skating rink that they eventually settle by with cups of mulled wine that Boris had tried to haggle over with the stallkeeper. Theo is half-watching two boys, one dark-haired and the other blond, chasing each other around the rink, spinning recklessly into tolerant parents, and half-watching Boris lick powdered sugar off of his fingers - the last remnant of a waffle he’d offered Theo even as he devoured it. </p><p>“Do you think -” he starts, then pauses. Boris watches him with amused, dark eyes.</p><p>“Do you ever wonder if we -” he says, and Boris is shaking his head before Theo can finish.</p><p>“Impossible to know, Potter.”</p><p>“So you never thought about if we could’ve - how we could’ve turned out differently,” Theo says, feeling obliquely disappointed.</p><p>“Of course I wonder,” Boris snorts, “so many years, hiding your bird and wishing I had never taken it from you - how could I not wonder? But we can’t know. And I think it gets us nowhere to ponder it. Not even nostalgia for the past, just pointless wondering.”</p><p>“So we should only look forward?” Theo finds he’s almost afraid of the answer, because what is all of this, if not looking back?</p><p>“Maybe,” Boris shrugs. “Or maybe just outward. Try not to spend so much time with our memories.”</p><p>Outward. It’s not what Theo’s used to; both of them know that. But he can stomach it, he thinks. He’s been trying, over the last year, at being different. Just a little. Emailing Boris, breaking off the engagement with Kitsey. Running the shop as honestly as he can afford to. It’s still so hard to tell, even from one minute to the next, if he’s making a mistake. Sitting there in the chilly afternoon, leeching warmth from his cup of wine and from Boris’ shoulder, just barely brushing his, he tries to put the question out of his mind.</p><p>—</p><p>On Christmas morning, he wakes up on the couch. The second that he moves his neck he knows he’d made a mistake in letting himself drift off during <em> Goldfinger </em>, winedrunk and warm. Boris is still where he’d been last night, stretched across the couch with his legs on Theo’s lap, nose pressed into the cushions. By all rights he should look uncomfortable, and Theo doesn’t doubt he’ll feel the same protesting muscles and joints when he gets up, but something about Boris’ sprawl seems purposeful. Half a step from graceful, even, if Theo tilts his head.</p><p>Boris mumbles and opens his eyes just a fraction as Theo shifts, and moves his legs so Theo can stand up. </p><p>“I’m making tea,” Theo tells him, getting only a sleepy hum in response.</p><p>Boris shuffles into the kitchen a few minutes later and watches him through heavy blinks. Theo can see Popchik eating breakfast in the living room, and a light rain pattering on the kitchen window. He pours water from the kettle into two mugs, watching it bubble over the strainers full of ceylon and turn dark. A heavy lavender scent drifts up and fills the kitchen, and as Theo spoons sugar into Boris’ cup he feels, for a moment, completely settled.</p><p>It’s that feeling that drives him to say, as he hands Boris his mug, “I got you something. For Christmas, I mean.”</p><p>Boris cups the mug in his hands and holds it up to his face, letting the steam catch and condensate on his skin.</p><p>“Have something for you as well,” he murmurs, “but later.”</p><p>“Alright,” Theo agrees easily, and they’re both quiet for a while after that. </p><p>Boris makes toast again, and Theo takes Popchik out after a reasonable amount of grumbling about which of them, exactly, had asked to bring him, but the day is, by its nature, stripped down to more significant events than the scaffolding that holds them up. And so it feels like no time has passed at all when he and Boris sit in tentative, half-disguised excitement on the couch. </p><p>“Oh, Potter,” Boris murmurs appreciatively as Theo hands him the jewelry bag, before he even sees what’s in it, and then he shakes the cufflinks onto his palm and bows his head to look at them, and goes utterly still.</p><p>Theo can’t read his expression, feels himself growing cold with uncertainty as he waits for Boris to look back up at him. </p><p>When he does, it’s with bright, wide eyes. “These - the jewels. They are from your mother’s earrings?” he asks, and there’s something cracked open in his expression that Theo can’t quite make out. </p><p>Still, he feels a wave of relief flood him at Boris’ improbable recognition, drowning the nerves and driving him to brush a finger against the cufflinks, the heat of Boris’ skin close enough to bite.</p><p>“I wanted you to have them,” he says, and Boris makes a noise of disbelief in his throat.</p><p>“Me?”</p><p>“Of course you,” Theo says. “I know you’ll care for them.”</p><p>Boris furrows his brow at that, looks at Theo seriously and asks, “This isn’t - Potter, I.” He pauses, and Theo doesn’t understand it. He tries again, more bluntly. “Why can’t you take care of them?”</p><p>“Oh,” Theo says, and he begins to understand it, sees the expression on Boris’ face for what it is: fear for why Theo might make this gesture at all.</p><p>“It’s not,” Theo starts, and finds that he’s as loathe as Boris is to name what exactly it isn’t. “My mother loved them,” he says instead, and Boris blinks quickly, as if to remind Theo that his own life has been lived adjacent to the knowledge of what mothers love.</p><p>“I gave them to Kitsey -”</p><p>“I saw her wear them at the party,” Boris interrupts, looking back down at the cufflinks in disbelief.</p><p>“Yes, well. It was a mistake. But I was trying to - I wanted someone to love them the way my mother did.”</p><p>“Would have worn your mother’s earrings, Potter,” Boris says softly, and Theo just shrugs, unwilling to admit the satisfaction he found in changing them, making them right for Boris.</p><p>“You like them, though,” he says, and it’s barely a question, but Boris smiles and answers anyway.</p><p>“Love them,” he murmurs, and the words send another wave of relief rushing through Theo like melting snow bolstering a shallow stream. Boris looks down at the cufflinks for another moment, then sets them carefully on the coffee table and leans forward and puts his forehead against Theo’s like he had in the carpark in Amsterdam, hand grasping the back of his neck with that same blazing certainty.</p><p>Unlike the carpark, however, this time both of them are sitting on a sofa, and Boris’ movement knocks their knees together. Boris’ other hand brushes against Theo’s jaw, then settles smoothly against the curve of his ribs. The effect of it all is that Theo feels his skin lighting up at those three points of contact, feels the urge to place his hands on Boris so strongly that it distances him from his body for a moment, the want rushing into him and leaving no room for anything else. He can feel it all changing; the anxiety and the desire to impress Boris and the fear that he does not know how to be anything or anyone capable of truly living fermenting into a kind of starving joy he recognizes from long ago.</p><p>He’s only just beginning to move, one hand hesitantly rising to rest on Boris’ arm, when Boris draws back and looks at him with dark, serious eyes. He parts his lips as if to speak, then closes them, one corner of his mouth curling up. He still has a hand pressed against Theo’s neck, and as Theo watches him, he feels Boris’ thumb brush against his skin. It’s the opposite of dizzying, although it makes his ears ring all the same.</p><p>The kiss, when it comes, is not a surprise. It’s broken by Boris after just a few seconds, but only so he can move slightly, to press his faintly stubbly cheek against Theo’s. Theo closes his eyes, and lets himself feel it: the flushed skin, the rush of air against his neck as Boris exhales, the buzzing graze of fingers against his nape. For a moment, with every good thing gathered under one roof, the world seems smaller and more alive than Theo has ever known it to be.</p><p>—</p><p>Boris wears the cufflinks to the airport the next morning. Theo had watched him put them on in the bedroom, running his thumb along the crimped metal points and wondering aloud which shirt they’d go with best. He’d refused all of Theo’s suggestions on the grounds that the scarf he’d given Theo for Christmas, Merino wool in shades of veridian, was the first good thing he’d seen him wear in a decade.</p><p>“What about the coat you bought me last year?” Theo had asked, and Boris scoffed.</p><p>“That was compromise coat,” he said, shaking his head. “You would not let me buy expensive coat! Standing there in Het Modepaleis complaining about money and colorful patterns as though we were poor orphans and not millionaires.”</p><p>They continue bickering in the same vein all the way through packing, Boris choosing a deep purple linen shirt (Theo’s second choice), taking Popchik on one last walk around Boris’s block before putting him in his bag, and to the airport. </p><p>“- and if you are so concerned about money,” Boris says on the way there, while the taxi driver pretends not to listen, “you know I will give you a job.”</p><p>“I’m trying to run an honest business,” Theo says, avoiding his eyes, and Boris laughs, not unkindly.</p><p>“Antiques! Honest business! Potter, you are my friend, so when you ask me for a job in a few years, I will give it to you happily. But I am telling you now, you can’t make money like that.”</p><p>“Maybe not,” Theo admits, “but I have to try.”</p><p>“I know,” Boris says. “And I must say, you seem happier.”</p><p>“Oh,” Theo says, a little surprised by the observation. He thinks on it for a moment, and finds he can truthfully say, at that moment, “well, I am happier.” He doesn’t add that he thinks the business has little to do with it.</p><p>“Good,” Boris says, the word a final judgment, and Theo has to look down at Popchik in his bag, nestled between them. </p><p>“Thank you,” he says, finally, glancing up at Boris and trying to keep his gaze steady. For all of it, he means, but can’t quite say. There are so many things that are easier in the dark, away from cabdrivers’ eyes and the sobering sunlight.</p><p>“It was nothing,” Boris lies, obviously and magnanimously, and Theo laughs. “I should be thanking you, Potter, for bringing Popchik out to see me.”</p><p>“You should come see him, next time,” Theo suggests, and then, bolstered by the sight of the cufflinks in Boris’ sleeves, he continues, “come see both of us. When you can.”</p><p>“When I can,” Boris agrees easily. </p><p>Theo doesn’t press it. His mother’s earrings are on Boris’ wrists, a piece of himself being left with Boris voluntarily, this time. It’s as much assurance as either of them can handle. </p><p>—</p><p>Boris stays with him all the way to the security checkpoint, where he hands over Popchik with great reluctance, and hugs Theo one-armed and tight. </p><p>“And you won’t stay for New Years?” he asks for the third or fourth time, and Theo lets out a huff of laughter despite himself.</p><p>“I’m already here,” he says, and Boris shrugs as if this doesn’t mean anything. But he does leave, eventually, and Theo shuffles through security and to his terminal, an hour early despite the copious delays Boris had created.</p><p>A year of tracking down changelings and Theo knows what to expect from the process, even with Popchik in tow. The flight will be too long, with too little space and too many babies. He’ll order a few drinks, definitely, and some food, maybe. Even with all of the layovers, the disappointment of air travel will remain predictable. </p><p>But not every aspect will need to be simply endured. As the sun rises over the Atlantic, he’ll let himself think about all the things still unnamed, the loose threads neither of them have yet dared to pull. Impossible to untangle all by himself, he’ll wait for the next time - an email, a chance location requited. Maybe even New York, after all these years, like Boris promised. </p><p>He’ll look out the window at the clouds hanging heavy below the plane, and the sky shading blue and orange and red. There is no such thing as a sustainably brilliant moment. Sooner than it should, the sun will pull above the clouds and the world will begin to look ordinary again. </p><p>He’ll take a picture as it rises to send to Boris when he lands, and hold the colors in his heart.</p>
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